Vanders wrote: "And no, outside of unit testing, the coder cannot teste their own code properly!"

I'd take exception with your exception. In managing programmers, you should always have someone else review test cases, including unit tests. One of the most common reasons for malfunctioning code is programmers misunderstanding the requirements. I guarantee you, if they don't understand the requirements when they write the code, they won't understand when they write the test wrappers and/or stubs, either.

It's good to have programmers write test code and devise test strategies. It makes them think. Having them do test code/specs for each other, too, makes them think even more.

I'm sure, however, since Vanders does testing for a living, he (?) will agree that a professional fulltime tester brings yet another perpective, and will find problems the programmers don't find.

The more testing methodologies you employ, the more problems you find.

The earlier you start thinking about testing, the less problems there will be to find.

The more problems you find in released code, the more there probably are still waiting to be found.